Story Trick #1: Eastern Promises

Today I’m going to commence a feature on this weblog called Story Tricks. I don’t know how often I’ll post these Story Tricks but hopefully they’ll become a fixed feature.

The idea came to me after I watched David Cronenberg’s excellent “Eastern Promises” last night. The script is written by Steven Knight and he utilizes a very simple and very subtle trick that, for me at least, was brilliant in keeping the suspense going in the first part of the film.

The protagonist, Anna (Naomi Watts) is a midwife at a hospital in London and one day a young girl dies in her ward while giving birth to a baby girl. The young woman is unknown but she did carry a diary with her. The problem is that the diary is written in Russian.

Although Anna herself is Russian she can’t read the language and therefore she asks her uncle Stepan to translate it for her. He abruptly refuses as he finds it highly immoral and utters “Do you always rob the bodies of the dead?”.

So Anna must find another way to translate the diary in order to find the relatives of the unknown young girl and hand over the baby to them. Inserted into the diary is a card of the restaurant owned by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Going there she meets Kirill and Nikolai and becomes clear that this restaurant is a meeting place for Russian gangsters in London.

Anna don’t know exactly why, but Semyon seems like a bad man. There is just something about him that’s off, maybe it’s because he’s too direct in offering to help Annie. On the other hand he seems like a very likable grandpa-kind-of-person and is very polite and forthcoming toward Anna and her request for a translation.

And here comes the trick. We as the viewer know that Semyon is bad and that the diary very likely contains information that he normally would have people killed for. The issue is then if Anna can trust Semyon to do a real translation or if he’s going to lie to her.

Parallel to this Anna keeps pushing her uncle to do the translation and he keeps refusing.

This subtle trick creates an enormous tension and suspense in the story, and we sit watching this part of the film on the edge of our seats hoping that uncle Stepan will come to his senses and help Anna so that she can get far away from Semyon. Even though this conflict is resolved in another way it moves the story forward in a very effective way.

I could easily imagine an entire movie centered on this; someone finds a book or scripture and has to get it translated. Unfortunately the person(s) he approaches with this task is someone whom stands to lose a lot if the knowledge in this book is to become publicly known. It’s simple trick and used many times before but it works very well.

I also highly recommend reading Steven Knight’s entire screenplay that Focus Features have so kindly made available online in this award season.